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Each colored square represents a kill

SNIPERRUSSIAN

At Stalingrad, a diminutive Red Army man made a big difference, one bullet at a time BY JOCHEN HELLBECK

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kettle. Pressing his right cheek to the rifles wooden stock, the former bookkeeper controlled his breathing, relaxed, and squeezed the trigger. The German collapsed.

The two men settled in again. Three hours later, another enemy soldier emerged. Again, the lieutenant nudged the man beside him. Again, the noncom breathed in, then half-breathed out. Again the cheek to the stock, the finger on the trigger, the squeeze, the puff of dust from another field-gray uniform whose wearer was now dead. Guns slung on shoul-ders, the two men retraced their steps out of the factory.

It was October 4, 1942. With his shooting, the diminu-tive rifleman, Vasily Grigoryevich Zaytsev, had qualified as a sniper with the Red Armys 284th Rifle Division on the war-wrecked streets of Stalingrad. Some of his targets had been nearly half a mile away. The next day, the novice killed five German soldiers; within the month his daily score had reached as many as 15. By the time the battle for Stalingrad ended four months later, contemporary reports listed Zayt-sev as having killed between 225 and 238 enemy soldiers. Zaytsev himself said 244including at least 10 German snip-ersand was acknowledged by the Soviets and the invaders alike as a symbol of a sniper corps that had afforded the Red Army a decisive edge in a crucial conflict.

VASILY ZAYTSEV TRAVELED A MEANDERING PATH to the role of sniper. Born in 1915, he grew up in the Chel- yabinsk region east of the Ural Mountains, in Western Sibe-ria. Appropriately for a woodlands clan, the name Zaytsev is related to the Russian word for hare. Vasily got his first rifle at 12. His forester father taught his offspring to shoot by having them hunt squirrels; Vasily and one of his broth-ers decided their sister deserved a squirrel coat; to keep the pelts intact, they dispatched each animal with a single pellet. But only his grandfather saw the small boywhom his family called the little pancake with earsas a born hunter, and invited the youngster along when he shouldered his rifle and went stalking goats and wolves.

In 1929, the Zaytsev family was transferred to a local collective farm. Vasily traded hunting for herding, then attended construction school. In the 1930s he helped build blast furnaces at the nearby construction site of Magni-togorsk. Harassed by older workers, he turned to bookkeep-ing instead. He liked the work, so precise and exacting, and

B L I V I O U S T O N E A R B Y M O R T A R blasts, the lieutenant gestured to the noncommissioned officer to follow him. Carrying rifles, the two climbed over twisted rails and into a destroyed metal factory. A brisk dawn was breaking as the men clambered past derelict furnaces and forging hammers. At a half-ruined brick wall the soldiers took out binoculars to study a gullied landscape.

Through the lenses the men saw threads of smoke rising from enemy dugouts. They waited unmoving until the lieutenant elbowed the noncom, a short, stocky man who before entering military service had been a bookkeeper. He barely nodded and raised his Mosin-Nagant rifle, squint-ing into the simple sight. From a dugout stepped a German infantryman holding a

OINTO THE SIMPLE SIGHT, THE

FORMER BOOKKEEPER PRESSED HIS RIGHT CHEEK TO THE RIFLES WOODEN STOCK, RELAXED, AND SQUEEZED THE TRIGGER. THE GERMAN COLLAPSED.

SQUINTING

Zaytsev and the tool of his violent trade.

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Amid the desolation characteristic of 1942 Stalingrad, Soviet soldiers move into position to engage the foe.

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prewar Soviet industrialization campaign. In 1930 the city counted around 150,000 residents; by the time the war broke out, the population had swelled to exceed 400,000, not including more than 100,000 refugees who were fleeing wartorn towns and regions further west.

The Germans were enthralled with the mystique of Stal-ingrad. Hitler believed by conquering the cityhome as he saw it to one million staunch Bolshevikshe would break the Soviet dictators neck. The task of capturing Stalingrad fell to the Sixth Army, an elite formation Hitler had called capable of storming the heavens.

Stalingrads defenders, led by 62nd Army commander Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, held on by their fingernails. To neutralize German artillery and airpower, Chuikov positioned his forces as near the enemy as possible. From basements, hidden bunkers, and ruined factories, squads of Red Army fighters staged partisan-style ambushes. The key weapons in this novel form of urban combat were subma-chine guns, hand grenades, knives, sharpened spadesand rifles in the hands of snipers.

FOUR THOUSAND MILES EAST IN VLADIVOSTOK, men of the 4th Submarine Brigade, Zaytsev included, offered to join the fight at Stalingrad. The high command

from 1933 until 1937 kept the books for a cooperative. In February 1937, at age 22, he enlisted in the Soviet navy, assigned as a petty officer to the 4th Submarine Brigade at the Pacific port of Vladivostok.

Zaytsev was there as a quartermaster when word came in August 1942 that the Germans were advancing on Stalingrad. After two weeks of bombing that claimed thousands of civilians, German command-ers sent infantry into the rubble, hoping to take the prize in a walk. But Soviet premier Joseph Stalin forbade a general evacua-tion of Stalingrads civilian population; he meant to hold his namesake city at all costs.

A key center for industry and weap-ons production, Stalingrad extended like a ribbon 25 miles along the Volgas west bank. The factory district in the north included the Red October steelworks, which produced 10 percent of Soviet steel, and the Dzerzhinsky tractor plant, a major producer of T-34 tanks in the Soviet Union.

Stalingrad had been reborn during the

A condent German Sixth Army advances in 1942, riding high on the assumption that the U.S.S.R. soon will fall.

N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5 35

reassigned the volunteers to the 284th Rifle Division, held in reserve in the Urals, 3,000 miles nearer the besieged city. A day before the 284th was to board trains for the front, the submarines, as soldiers called them, arrived.

Changing from black seamans jackets and flared trousers into earthen Red Army uniformsZaytsev wore his hor-izontally striped seamans shirt under his infantry garbthe former sailors mustered before rifle company officers. Commanders eagerly picked tall and athletic types, ignoring Zaytsev except to snicker at his gigantic footwear; infantry boots his size were out of stock. A head for numbers and communications skills landed Zaytsev in charge of a supply platoon. Nothing suggested he was destined for combat.

Zaytsevs platoon served under Lieutenant Vasily Bolsheshchapov, who during the days-long train trip to Stal-ingrads vicinity instructed his new-fledged ground troops in machine-gun maintenance and technique. He stood men one by one before a weapon disassembled and spread across a railcar floor. Most struggled with the metal puzzle, but the little bookkeeper crisply built up the machine gun. Astounded, the lieutenant asked where he had gotten his facility with weapons. Explaining his background, Zaytsev pleaded to be a rifleman. Bolsheshchapov consented.

The train stopped in Burkovka, 10 miles east of Stalingrad;

from the village the soldiers marched to the Volgas east bank. Across the river the entire city seemed to be burning. Under intense enemy fire, ferrymen and rowers were haul-ing Soviet wounded to safety. Bandaged and bleeding men limped and crawled past the fresh troops. Overhead, Luft-waffe pilots were downing one Soviet plane after another.

That night, ferries carried the 284th across the water and into the flaming ruins. At dawn mortar rounds rained on them. The infantry troops dove behind fuel storage tanks, only to have enemy planes attack. Gasoline from ruptured tanks soaked the soldiers, who fell back to the Volga, ripping off burning clothes and leaping into the frigid water. Some had on only undershirts; some were naked, some draped with tarps. Even so, they went on the attack, forcing Ger-mans out of the Metiz metal factory at the foot of Mama-yev Hill, the most hotly contested patch of Stalingrad. For four months, control of that hill would seesaw between the opposing forces, and between the two sides sniper units.

DURING THE 1930s THE RED ARMY HAD MAINTAINED multiple marksmanship schools whose textbooks enshrined sniper terror, a doctrine stipulating that these specialists should seek not only to kill but to immobilize and demor-alize. Techniques included stalking and shooting but also INTE

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at Stalingrad had oneZaytsevs was serial number 2828but a standard Mosin, with its low-tech sight, was nothing to sneeze at. The rifle was said to be accurate to 1,000 yards, and was much less cumbersome when not fitted with a scope. Say youre inside a building, next to a small embra-sure, Zaytsev explained after the battle for Stalingrad. With a periscope you need a larger embrasure, and if the embrasure is large, then the enemy can see you. So there are times when its better just to use an ordinary rifle. And with an ordinary rifle, a distance of two hundred meters is still just two hundred meters. Your accuracy isnt as good, but if you know how to shoot that doesnt matter.

In addition to sessions in the pipe, Zaytsev oversaw gun-nery practiceand practiced what he preached, shooting daily, as neophytes did, with sniper rifles and ordinary rifles. They used standard sights for targets as far as 1,100 yards away, and scopes to reach 1,600 yards. The drill mixed care-fully framed single shots with precision volleys. Wartime Stalingrad was short on squirrels, but mice and rats made ready targets. Playing on the meaning of Zaytsev, other soldiers called Vasilys students zaichata, or baby hares.

When Zaytsev thought a class of zaichata had developed sufficiently, he took one or two at a time into combat. He showed them how to locate a hide, and how to build one invisible to the enemy. German snipers tended to occupy a single hide for prolonged periods. Zaytsev kept several hides, moving every two or three shots, or after every kill. Dont rush, he would say. For the enemy not to recognize you, kill him with your first shot, he noted, crowding his apprentices into a hide. As they watched through scopes or binoculars, often for hours, Zaytsev waited for a shot. After the first

how to build hides: camouflaged nooks as complicated as a hunters shooting stand or as simple as makeshift shields of scrap wood, metal, or even corpses. The cult of the sniper came to rival that of hero workers like Aleksey Stakha-nov, who in August 1935 dug 102 tons of coal in a single shift, sparking the Stakhanovite Movement. Following the German invasion in June 1941, posters and other pro-paganda extolled the individual Soviet gunman, whether working alone or with a spotter using a periscope. Men and women could be Red Army snipers if they had the requisite tenacity, patience, and sang-froidStakhanovite killers, harvesting German corpses.

After Zaytsevs spectacular debut as a shooter, he helped make his unit, the 1047th Rifle Regiment, an improvised finishing school for snipers. Along with his regular duty at the front, he toured bivouacs, identifying marksmen by their eagle eyes, superior grasp of weapons maintenance and tac-tics, and unblinking capacity to kill. He became a teacher, taking only students eager to attend an academy where death was the passing gradeand the price of failure.

Five or six apprentice snipers at a time joined Zaytsev in his lecture halla ventilation pipe at the Metiz factory. The introductory course focused on rifle mechanics, specif-ically those of the Mosin-Nagant. That venerable five-shot, bolt-action rifle dated to 1891, when the Czars army issued it. The weapon underwent modernization in 1930. Simple, reliable, and accuratethough not as technologically sophisticated as the Walthers and Mausers that German snipers usedthe Mosin was a Red Army staple.

A sniper variant of the Mosin, mounting an outdated tele-scopic sight, was highly prized; only about half the shooters

THE RIFLE Vasily Zaytsev and other Soviet snipers wielded the Mosin-Nagant 91/30introduced in 1891, updated in 1930, and named for the Russian and the Belgian on whose designs it was based.

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German fell, each student took a turn. Adopting Zaytsevs revolutionary tactical approach, Soviet snipers were able to neutralize the enemys technological advantages.

Sniping is intellectual, Zaytsev told neophytes. Killing him doesnt take long, he said. But outwitting him, think-ing about how to get the better of himthats not so easy. He told how, on Mamayev Hill, he had dueled with a German sniper positioned somewhere opposite him. The first three days of their assignment the Russian killed two enemy sol-diers. On day four, Romanians serving with the Wehrmacht passed through Zaytsevs field of fire. When he did not shoot, the German, believing himself safe, raised the sheet of iron he had been hiding under and crawled out to stretch. Zayt-sev killed him with a shotand when the Romanians rushed to the dead man he killed them, too.

Another time on Mamayev Hill, an enemy bunker pro-tected by snipers was thwarting Soviet attacks. Zaytsev sent two gunmen after their enemy counterparts, but his men missed their shots and were wounded. A superior ordered

Zaytsev into the fray, telling him to take two snipers. As the Soviets neared the scene, shots suddenly had the trio lunging and crawling on all fours to hunker in a trench far back from the contested bunker.

Zaytsev set his helmet on a parapet. A shot by the German sent the headgear flying. Five hours of similar exchanges gradually revealed the enemy sniper to be somewhere far on the back side of the bunker. Zaytsev stretched a mitten over a slat and raised it. The German fired. Analyzing the hole, Zaytsev deduced the bullets trajectoryand his opponents location. Grabbing a trench periscope, he scanned the battlefield as the Soviet infan-try charged the bunker, which was spitting machine-gun fire. The German sniper, perhaps thinking he had killed the man

HIM DOESNT TAKE LONG, ZAYTSEV TOLD HIS STUDENTS. BUT OUTWITTING HIM, THINKING ABOUT HOW TO GET THE BETTER OF HIMTHATS NOT SO EASY.

KILLING

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In skilled hands, telescopic sights extended the ries range to 875 yards or more (1). The internal magazine held ve 7.65x54 bulletsequivalent to the U.S. .30-caliber round. (2,3). A round left the barrel at a muzzle velocity of 2,838 feet per second (4). Rough nishes and tool marks (5) are common on wartime weapons manufactured in a hurry and with less rigorous quality control.

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Somewhere on the Eastern Front, a Soviet photographer got a snipers-eye view through a scope of a German in the cross hairs.

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who had been testing him, rose into view. Zaytsev shot. The German fell. Zaytsev then went for the gunners in the bunker, suppressing their automatic fire. The Red infantry took the bastion without losses.

In describing such episodes, Zaytsev emphasized the need not only to survive missions but to speak of them. Like sharing food or tobacco, storytelling forged friend-ship and trust, he said, adding that all sol-diers depend on one another, but snipers especially need comradeship to augment the skills of cunning and ruse.

PROPAGANDISTS CAPITALIZED ON the Stalingrad shooters exploits. Red Army newspapers counted kills; a boldface October 21, 1942, headline read simply 66readers needed no more informa-tion. Sniper Sytnikov has killed eighty-eight Germans, the same edition declared. What about you? Unblooded gunners had to live with catcalls. Echoing the 1930s-era Stakhanovite phenomenon, authorities encouraged socialistic competition for the largest numbers of Fritzes killed. Some gunners embraced their press coverage. The fascists should know the strength of weapons in the hands of Soviet supermen, one proclaimed. Zaytsev was not immune. I always know that I am cleverer and stronger than the German and that my rifle is more accurate than his, he was quoted as saying. I am always calm and I there-fore dont fear the Germans.

This outlook found reinforcement every-where. Red Army political officers issued every infantryman a pocket journal in which to record kills. The title page quoted the writer Ilya Ehrenburg: Unless youve killed at least one German in a given day, your day has been wasted. Soldiers loved Ehrenburg, who described the Germans as worse than wild beasts, worthy only of being dispatched. Ehrenburg summed up his ethos in the title of his best-known wartime article: Kill!

Patriotic propaganda resonated with Soviet soldiers, especially those new to combat. When I first got the rifle, I couldnt bring myself to kill a living being: one German was standing there for about

RIFLEMENMany westerners

rst encountered

Vasily Zaytsev

in Enemy at the

Gates 1 , a 2001 lm

loosely based on his

story. That looseness

begins with casting;

to play the stocky,

ve-foot-four-inch

Siberian, the produc-

ers cast willowy

English six-footer

Jude Law. Enemy

also presents the

284th Rie Divisions

stealthy nighttime

Volga crossing as a

midday bloodbath.

Andunlike the real

Red Army, which

issued each trooper a

riethe ctional

force at Stalingrad

hands every other

soldier a Mosin-

Nagant; the empty-

handed are to take

up weapons dropped

by those who fall in

combat. Likewise,

when in the movie a

German fusillade

forces Soviet soldiers

back, Red Army

machine gunners

mow down retreat-

ing comrades; NKVD

political ofcers did

shoot men they

deemed cowards,

but the actual Red

Army did not assign

machine-gun squads

to that task.

Zaytsev himself

provided one of the

lms tall tales in his

memoirs. Enemy

ends in a sniping

duel between Zayt-

sev and one Major

Knig, a German sent

to take out his Rus-

sian counterpart. But

there is no evidence

that a sharpshooter

named Knig existed.

Sniper duels have

huge box-ofce

appeal, though; the

makers of 2014s

American Sniper 2

concocted a one-on-

one rivalry in that

military melodrama,

set in Iraq and based

on a memoir by the

late U.S. Navy Seal

Chris Kyle, portrayed

by Bradley Cooper.

Both Enemy and

Sniper carry on in the

tradition of 1941s

top-grossing Ameri-

can lm, Sergeant

York 3 . That produc-

tion, nominated for

11 Academy Awards,

starred Gary Cooper

as former pacist

Alvin York, awarded

a Medal of Honor for

marksmanship while

serving in the Ameri-

can Expeditionary

Forces in France

during World War I.

Interestingly, all

three master snipers

diaries and memoirs

reveal that they

learned to shoot as

youths, hunting

squirrels in the

woodsin Tennes-

see, in the Urals,

and in Texas.

Jochen Hellbeck

1

2

3

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four minutes, talking, and I let him go, sniper Anatoly Chekhov recalled. When I killed my first one, he fell at once. Another one ran out and stooped over the killed one, and I knocked him down, too. I was shaking all over: the man was only walking to get some water! I felt scared: Id killed a person! Then I remembered our people and started killing them without mercy.

Memories of atrocities animated even the tough-minded Zaytsev. He could remember how, at the metal factory, he and other soldiers had to watch Germans drag away a woman, evidently to rape her. Mama, where are they taking you? a boy yelled. Brothers, save me! she shouted. Help me! The Soviet soldiers stood helpless. How does that affect you? Zaytsev recalled a year later. Youre on the front line. You dont have enough men. If you rush out to help her youll be slaughtered; itll be a disaster. Or another time you see young girls, children hanging from trees in the park. Does that get to you? That has a tremendous impact.

Red Army snipers at Stalingrad initially operated defen-sively from ambushes, but gradually went over to the attack. On December 17, 1942, Zaytsevs battalion failed to take a

bridge, with heavy losses. Zaytsev and four compatriots, carrying rifles and submachine guns, slipped around the German flank and into a bombed-out building on the route to the bridge. When their battalion resumed its attack, Ger-mans ran out to hurl grenades, only to be shot down. The Germans retaliated by bringing out a heavier gun, but Zay- tsevs group deployed automatic weapons to kill every enemy soldier; the final tally was 28. Their battalion took the bridge.

In the course of the battle for Stalingrad, Soviet snipers killed some 10,000 Wehrmacht soldiers, but numbers do not account for psychological impact. Zaytsev and his pupils sought to wear down their prey, keeping enemy troops from being able to stand erect or eat or haul ammunition. German veterans of Stalingrad described shots coming from behind stumps, from out of pipes, from beneath corpses.

Several times, German fire almost claimed Vasily Zaytsev. Among his most effective hides was the furnace in a burned building. Spotted there, he came under mortar volleys that collapsed the chimney onto him. He lay unconscious for two hours, then tried to dig himself out, which proved impossible until he jerked his feet from his buried boots. He wrapped his feet in rags and ran down an alley.

On January 15, 1943, Zaytsev was firing at German snipers on Mamayev Hill from beneath an abandoned railcar when the enemy spotted him. A hail of bullets struck the railcar. A larger round exploded above. Face burned, body and clothing shredded by shrapnel, one knee dislocated, right eardrum ruptured, Zaytsev was still alive, but clearly out of the fight. Soon after, the 284th Rifle Division took Mamayev Hill for good, and within weeks the battle for Stalingrad was done, the Germans and their Axis allies routed in the Red Armys turning point victory of the war.

By late February, Zaytsev was at the Kremlin accepting the Hero of the Soviet Union, his nations highest honor. He had the shakes, and pieces of shrapnel still lodged under an eye, but he spoke with amazement of his months in combat. We didnt know fatigue, he said. Wed go three or four days without sleeping, without even feeling sleepy. How can I explain this? Youre in a constant state of agitation; the whole situation is having a terrible effect on you. Every sol-dier, including myself, is thinking only of how he can make them pay more dearly for his life, how he could slaughter even more Germans. You think only of how to harm them even more, to spite them as much as you can.

In April 1943, his sniping days over, Zaytsev recounted his story to a historical commission. During his testimony, he mused on how his experiences in civilian life had figured in his days as a soldier. Bookkeeping is good, calm, quiet work, Vasily Zaytsev said. It takes you into the depths of life. You feel like youre in charge, that something depends on you. I like that. Its independent work, and whatever you do, you must apply to your life. 2

A post-Stalingrad poster featuring Zaytsev reads, Be precise: kill an enemy with each bullet!